The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Essential HuffPost

Amid intense speculation about his whereabouts in the last two months and questions about filling the leadership vacuum in Congress, party Vice President Rahul Gandhi finally returned to Delhi on Thursday on board a chartered Thai Airways plane from Bangkok.

This is the Income Tax Department's list of 31 top tax defaulters, who together owe the government Rs 1,500 crore.

Two independent films from India, Masaan and Chauthi Koot, will be competing at the 'Un Certain Regard' section of this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Inspired by an Australian band, an Indian group called The Enthu Cutlets have given a unique riff to several Bollywood classics.

This is how Kalki Koechlin prepared for her role, as a woman with cerebral palsy, in forthcoming movie 'Margarita With A Straw'.

Main News

Though international agencies have earlier warned of a weak Indian monsoon, private Delhi-based weather forecaster Skymet said this was unlikely and India may actually end up with slightly more rain than normal.

Hurriyat leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Masarat Alam were put under house arrest on Thursday to prevent them from leading a rally on Friday to Tral, where a 24-year-old was shot dead by the Army on Monday. The police have registered a case against Mr. Geelani, Mr. Alam and Peer Saiffulah for hoisting the Pakistani flag at a rally on Wednesday.

The government has imposed a five-day ban on English news channel Al Jazeera for repeatedly showing a map of India, depicting parts of Kashmir in Pakistan.

Former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly and all-rounder Ravi Shastri are the leading candidates to replace Duncan Fletcher as the new coach of the Indian cricket team.

Nearly one lakh pre-matriculation students from various minority communities of Jharkhand have been unable to access Centre-sponsored scholarships in the 2013-14 fiscal, mostly due to government apathy.

Haryana's 'special status cabinet-rank' Yoga ambassador Baba Ramdev's company is among the biggest domestic buyers of red sanders in the country, the sandalwood that has been at the centre of several smuggling operations and most recently, claimed the lives of tribal woodcutters.

Off The Front Page

Reserve Bank governor Raghuram Rajan has received a death-threat from an email-id with ostensible links to Islamic State militants.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is featured in the Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people, with an article President Barack Obama calling him "India's reformer-in-chief."

Vijay Mallya's 11-seater private jet was sold to a scrap dealer for Rs 22 lakh to part-pay the debt of his grounded Kingfisher airlines. The private jet presently parked in Mumbai airport was bought by the ironically-named Silent Enterprises.

The Supreme Court has said artistic freedom cannot condone the use of abusive language, especially if it involves Mahatma Gandhi.

For all the noise the government generates around rescuing national air carrier Air India, it turns out that several ministries collectively owe the airline Rs 600 crore towards costs of VVIP travel.

Opinion

Irfan Habib, in The Hindu, says that current attempts to trace the historical course of the river Saraswati are misguided and bereft of common sense.

Prabhat Patnaik, in The Telegraph, takes exception to Narendra Modi's use of the term "five-star" activists and argues that it is such 'privileged' activists who keep faith in the legal system intact.

Sankar Ramamurthy, in The Indian Express, says that the Satyam accounting scandal underlines the need to remind public accountants that the profession has a strong ethical dimension.